


why do memories glow (the way real moments don't)

by sinkingsidewalks



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Adoption, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - No SHIELD (Marvel), Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Teen Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-12 22:21:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29391888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinkingsidewalks/pseuds/sinkingsidewalks
Summary: Jemma knows how to make decisions, even big ones, especially big ones, no matter what anyone else says.Or: Loss, isolation, and the decade it takes to get it right.
Relationships: Leo Fitz & Jemma Simmons, Leo Fitz/Jemma Simmons
Comments: 21
Kudos: 16





	1. my life began the day that you came in it

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I guess the explanation for this is that I watched Juno the other day and I've been meaning for years to write a university/academy fic, so I guess those two things combined into this. Not really sure if I can do this story any sort of justice but my brain won't let me do anything else until I write it so I figure I might as well post it. Chapter titles (and the title title) are from hayley williams songs because I've had that on repeat for days

December 2004

Jemma sat on an exam table in the school clinic, her jumper pooled around her waist, her vest sticking to the small of her back with sweat. Either the heat was turned up too high, an aggressive attempt to make people comfortable with the Massachusetts winter battering outside, or she was nervous sweating. It was probably both. 

The room was small and stark, white washed walls that rattled every time a door shut in the hallway, and nothing like the family clinic her doctor back home worked out of; here there were no cutesy pictures of babies wearing flowers as hats on the walls, although maybe that would have made her feel sicker, rather than comforted. The walls were too thin, just slightly, and she could hear the rumble of voices bleeding through the wall behind her. It was her first time in the clinic, despite a year under her belt already, she kept her yearly check-ups for trips home, because the American medical system scared her. She’d heard too many horror stories from kids in her classes about getting their stomach pumped, then getting the bill. But this time she hadn’t had much of a choice. 

The panic rose again. She focused on her breathing, counting each inhale and exhale so she wouldn’t hyperventilate, and the door swung open. The doctor was tall and thin, handsome for a woman, with an expression that somehow straddled caring and stern. She sat in the chair at the desk and flipped through a file. Jemma’s file. 

“So based on the bloodwork, you’re probably between four and six weeks, do you know the date of your last menstrual cycle?”

Jemma’s heart froze. Her breath caught in her lungs. Her stomach clenched with nausea. “I’m pregnant.” 

The doctor looked up, “I’m sorry, the nurse said you’d taken a home test.”

Jemma nodded, it made her dizzy. “I did,” she’d taken six, they’d all had the same result. “I just, I guess I was waiting for confirmation.”

“Do you need a minute?”

She shook her head, still dizzy, getting worse too. But this was just science, she could handle science. “What’s the hCG level?” The doctor looked confused so she explained. “I’m in bio.” No use explaining that she was already through one PhD and onto her second, she didn’t have time for those questions the way her stomach was threatening. 

The doctor nodded, flipped through the paper again. “HCG is 427 mili-units per millilitre, which is what we’d consider normal for anywhere in the first month or so, as I’m sure you know.”

“In a healthy pregnancy hormone levels can double over the course of 24 hours.” She couldn’t wrap her head around pregnant, she couldn’t wrap her head around how she was pregnant. 

“Yes, but given your medical history, there’s no need to do a follow up test. Do you remember the date of your last period?”

“The eleventh of November.” She’d had class that morning and had almost been late because she’d had to run back into her room for a tampon. 

“That would put you at just over five weeks, so your due date is mid-August.”

They’d had sex three weeks, two days, and twelve hours ago, but pregnancy was based on menstruation, not ovulation, which is why it was ten months, not nine like people thought, gestational age was fertilization age plus two weeks. Ten months, forty weeks. Five weeks from forty. Her mind turned it into a fraction, 5/40 was equivalent to 1/8 which was 0.125 or 12.5%. She was twelve point five percent through and she hadn’t even known it. 

She’d been silent too long and the doctor looked at her gently, “I can schedule you an appointment with a counsellor to discuss your options.”

She shocked back to her body, to the hard table beneath her and the blast of heat coming through a vent in the ceiling and the low chatter from the waiting room that she could hardly hear. The words came spilling out of her mouth before she knew what she was saying, “I can’t get an abortion.”

They both sat startled, Jemma wasn’t even sure if she believed it. She’d never had to consider it before. She figured that wasn’t what the doctor was used to hearing, she figured most girls who came in here, accidentally pregnant, wanted to get back to their classes, back to their work. It was MIT after all. That’s what Jemma wanted too, she wanted to be thinking about her lab that afternoon and the paper she was writing on bioluminescent applications, but it didn’t seem that simple, she felt like there was a variable she was missing. 

“Miss Simmons,” The doctor said very gently, softer than her face indicated she was capable of, “You’re seventeen.” She paused back on herself, like maybe she shouldn’t have said that. She blinked and started again. “You have options, and I’m sure you have a bright future ahead of you. I would highly suggest you talk with a counsellor, just to make an informed decision.”

Jemma nodded, gnawed at her lip. “I have class this afternoon, then all tomorrow.”

The doctor turned to her computer, Jemma realized she didn’t actually know her name. They sat silently while the monitor loaded. She felt exhausted, like her brain was the white static on a TV, like she’d just written a four-hour test and all her thoughts had been left on the page, like she was empty. 

“How about Thursday at ten in the morning? You’ll be meeting with Dr. Sanders.”

“Yes, that works. I have all of Thursdays free.” She and Fitz usually spent the day at the library studying or working on papers or lab reports. It was quieter there during the week as opposed to the bustle of the weekend, they usually snagged a whole long table to themselves and spread out with snacks. It was their main day for bookwork. She had plans to outline her final projects that week and Fitz had two reports to write that he’d been avoiding.

Her stomach dropped out from under her, like a rollercoaster cresting over the top of a hill, sending her down for the long drop, her heart in her throat and her limbs left behind. 

She had to tell Fitz. 

August 2003

“Mum stop,” Jemma whined, then regretted it. It made her sound nine when really she was fifteen trying to be twenty. 

Heather kept fiddling with her hair though, fixing the long ends of her bangs that hadn’t quite grown out to the length of the rest of her hair yet, and tucking her ponytail over her shoulder. “It’s not every day my only daughter goes off to university, let me indulge.” Her mum stepped back with the camera, looking through the lens once again.

Jemma rolled her eyes but didn’t move from her spot at the mantle, her two oversized suitcases framing her, she knew if she fought it they’d just take even longer. “You know I’ve already been to uni.”

“Smile, sweetie.” Heather said, ignoring her. 

She put on her ‘cheese’ smile and said through her teeth. “Your ‘only daughter’ already has a PhD.”

“Yes, yes,” Heather dismissed. “But you did that from home, this is big! You’re going to America!” The camera clicked too many times, the flash burnt into the backs of Jemma’s eyes, then her mom was back to arranging the flowers in the vase behind her, ones Jemma thought must have been purchased for the occasion since her mother never had an interest in real flowers before. She shot a pleading look at her father, who was sitting on the couch with the paper. 

“I’m going to miss my flight.” She said it emphatically, and her dad finally looked up. 

“Oh, yes. Heather we should really head off.” They both looked at the old grandfather clock in the corner even though it was perpetually wrong.

“Yes, yes, fine.” Heather tossed the camera onto the coffee table, amid the pile of old newspapers, and kissed both of Jemma’s cheeks. 

She closed her eyes, the smell of her mother’s perfume washing over her. Normally, it made her wrinkle her nose, but she knew she wouldn’t be smelling it for months, so it was comforting in a way she didn’t usually experience with her mom. 

“Now, are you sure you have everything?”

Jemma looked at her bags, two suitcases that were each big enough for her to climb into if they were empty, and her backpack which was overflowing. “I’m sure.” She hitched her bag onto her shoulder and already felt the ache. It was going to be a long day. 

Her dad grabbed one suitcase and she took the other, and they made their way to the car while her mom hovered. Jemma hadn’t been nervous, had been excited all the day before and into the morning, but her mom’s nerves leached off onto her and she felt the pit in her stomach growing. Her dad was getting the bags into the back of the car so she was stuck with her mother. 

“You know where you’re going once you get there?” 

“Yes, the apartment is on Franklin Street.”

“And we’re sure this girl you’re living with is going to be appropriate?”

“I’ve been emailing her for weeks, Mum.”

“Well that doesn’t mean-“ she was cut off by the boot slamming.

“All set,” her dad dusted his hands off. “She’ll be fine, Heather.” He kissed the side of his wife’s head and Jemma got into the passenger seat. 

She rolled the car window down. “Bye, Mum. I’ll see you at Christmas.”

“Yes, we’ll see you then. Have a good time; don’t study too much.” 

Her mum was still talking as they pulled out of the drive and Jemma breathed a sigh of relief once they were gone. 

“You know she’s happy for you, we both are,” Her dad explained. 

Jemma let her head fall back against the car seat. “Yeah, I know.”

“And we’re proud, so, so proud, of everything you’re doing kiddo.”

“Thanks, Dad.” It was raining outside the window, just lightly, typical England. Waiting in the drive had dampened the top of her head and shoulders, given her a slight chill despite the day not being cold at all. She wondered what kind of weather she’d be landing in, when they’d visited MIT it had been in the spring and their weekend had been full of sunshine and blooming flowers. 

It was a three-hour drive to Heathrow but it was worth it so that she could get a direct flight to Boston. Her dad cued up the music and they mostly drove in silence, watching the country slip by. The motorways were empty; it was a Tuesday at mid-morning. 

“Maybe you’ll be driving on the way back at Christmas,” her dad teased and Jemma cringed. She’d yet to get behind the wheel and didn’t have any desire to, but she knew she’d be eligible for a license in America. From what she’d heard they let pretty much anyone drive there. It was the opposite of encouraging.

“On the wrong side of the road, maybe.”

“Well, we wouldn’t want that.” 

Silence was easy with her dad, so much was easy with her dad, not like it was with her Mum. Dad said that was just typical, just teenager stuff, that they were doomed to butt heads, but it felt like she couldn’t remember them ever getting along. It felt cruel to even think it but she didn’t feel like she was going to miss her mom at all. 

Her dad though, they spoke the same language, never mind that she’d outpaced his math knowledge when she was nine. They could understand each other without ever saying a word. She was nervous about leaving that, she was nervous about being alone instead of just feeling lonely. 

She was used to being the youngest, had been all her life, she’d skipped ahead for the first time in year two when they realized she could read and write her letters and do basic addition at six years old. She’d convinced herself that she didn’t let it bother her. But she’d always had her family around to make up for the fact that she didn’t have peers, didn’t really have friends. 

Every step of her schooling had been an easy choice, a natural progression, GCSEs to A Levels to taking uni classes on top of that to taking the train into Manchester every day. It was why she’d wanted to change it up, to do something different, when she’d announced it her parents probably thought she just meant moving to Oxford or Cambridge, but then she’d started looking into PhD programs worldwide, and MIT had been an easy choice. 

They pulled up at Heathrow, parked in a crowded lot, then she was staring down the security line, her backpack digging into her shoulders. It happened in a flash, in the blink of an eye. Her dad had one hand on her shoulder and it felt like the only think keeping her from slipping, from melting into a puddle of anxiety. 

“It’s okay to be scared and it’s okay to think you made a mistake, but you haven’t and it won’t feel like that forever.” 

Jemma put on a false smile, “I’m okay Dad.”

“I know; I just want you to know it. And you can call me anytime, even if the time change means it’s the middle of the night.”

He hugged her and she wanted to cry. She was excited, she wanted to go more than anything else in the world, but she also wanted to cry in her bed like a little girl. 

“I’m so proud of you.” He said, then she made herself walk away. She made herself get lost in the crowd, and she didn’t look back.

June 2012

“Fitz! If you’re not out of there in five minutes I’m coming in! Whether you’re dressed or not!” Jemma yelled through the door into the bathroom. It had been close to an hour and he still wasn’t ready. Whoever said girls took forever to get ready had never met Fitz.

“No, you will not!” he yelled back, voice pitched too high in panic because he knew she would. She smirked at the door and studied herself in the front hall mirror. Her dress was lilac and fell just above her knees. It had beaded flowers on the bodice and just the slightest bit of crinoline under the skirt to give it poof. She’d gotten it wildly on sale at one of the shops in the mall that was too expensive for her to be in on her researcher salary. It had been the only one left on the rack and magically was her size so it felt lucky, not that she believed in that kind of stuff. But it made her feel pretty and it made her feel tall. 

“Two minutes Fitz!” she yelled at him again and the door opened a second later. 

“I’m done, I’m done!” He had his hands up like she had a gun and his tie was all askew, like he hadn’t tightened it properly yet. He looked nice, with his hair lightly styled and his job interview suit on, and it made her heart speed up. She felt a blush rise into her cheeks. 

“Wow, uh, you look really nice, Simmons.”

“So do you.” She looked away to stop looking at him and picked up her purse, checking its contents, phone, keys, lipstick. “Now fix your tie and let’s go, we’re already late.”

Fitz rolled his eyes. “Hardly.” 

“It’s going to take forever to park at the church, you know it always does, so by that point we will be late.” 

Dennis from the lab was getting married – again – so they were going to support him – again – not together but in the same car because it was economical. Besides they shared a car so there wasn’t much of a choice, so it definitely wasn’t a statement. 

“Well then you can run in and get us seats while I park.”

“It’s still rude.”

“Come on, it’s not like these things ever start on time anyway.” He was complaining, but he had his tie fixed and his top shirt button done up. “Have everything?”

Jemma nodded. “Waiting on you.”

He snatched the car keys from between her fingers and they were off. Fitz drove, Jemma sat in the passenger seat with the window down, the wind whipping her hair around the front seat. It was the perfect day for a wedding, sunny and bright but not too hot. The humidity was down so nothing was sticky and it would hardly even matter that the church was old and didn’t have air conditioning. 

They weren’t late for three reasons, because Fitz drove like a maniac, parked in the overflowing lot with the accuracy of an engineer, and was right, weddings never started on time. They snagged seats in the middle row with Charlotte and Embry who both worked in the lab with them and their wives. 

“Odds on this one sticking?” Embry asked, under his breath so no one could hear. His wife shot him a glare but he only shrugged. Dennis had been married three time before, only one other that Fitz and Jemma had been to having only spent the last three years working with him, but Embry, who’d known him since college was at his forth. 

“I mean his stats are getting worse each time,” Charlotte chuckled. 

Jemma shot them all a look. “I think it’s sweet that he keeps trying.” 

“Yeah,” Fitz mumbled, “He obviously just hasn’t found the right girl.” 

Jemma felt his eyes linger on her for half a second, just a fraction of a moment too long, and she felt it pull in her stomach. She fixed her eyes back towards the front of the chapel. It did her no good to dwell on his looks, she knew there was nothing to come from them, she knew he just couldn’t help it sometimes to wear his heart on his sleeve. There were feelings there, of course there were, there had been since they first met a decade ago, but they’d made their bed a long time ago and there was no choice but to lie in it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is just a little intro, hopefully I'll have the next chapter cleaned up for posting in a couple days. Please let me know what you think, I haven't written in forever and I'm very needy


	2. i put all my demons on display

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Point of note: I didn't even go to university, much less have gotten a doctorate, so while I've done my best to make this as realistic as possible there are undoubtably errors, just go with it?

September 2003

After four days at MIT Jemma had decided her least favourite class was review methodology and three weeks later she had yet to change her mind. The prof, Sitwell, was dull – which she expected out of an undergrad but usually higher level instructors actually cared about teaching – the room was cold and too small – there was a draft that came through the walls and it made her shiver for two hours every week – and worst of all there was this _boy._

He had to be as young as her, or younger, because he had curly blonde hair like a little kid, and rounded cheeks that her grandfather would have pinched – she knew, even though she barely remembered the man. He stayed after each lecture to talk to the professor for longer than she wanted to wait to have her own conversation with him, and the one time she overheard them talking it was mostly him repeating himself because Sitwell couldn’t understand his accent. And that was the other thing, he was Scottish, which meant everyone in the class automatically lumped them together as the two foreign babies. 

The class was familiar, all stuff she had to do for her last degree, which made her dread it even more. But there was no way out of it, it was a requisite for all PhD students at MIT, so she tried to find a way to bear it. Until the class was paired up to peer review each other, and the prof, probably because they’re the same age – she learned that he was only barely older than her – decided they should be partners. 

Class ended, she stayed in her seat because she figured he’d need his usual twenty minutes to talk to Sitwell about god knows what. She wondered if he was somehow new to school, maybe it was his first time in an advanced program and he actually didn’t know anything about research practices. She flipped through her notes while she waited, filling in details she’d missed in the lecture, she was nothing if not diligent. Even if she knew all the information already, you could never tell when something would come in handy. She got lost in correcting her spelling and bullet point organization until she heard a throat clear above her. 

“Um, hi.” The boy, his name was Fitz, or that’s what she’d heard someone call him, not that she paid extra attention to him. 

“Don’t you need to talk to the professor?”

“What?”

“Every week, you talk to the prof for like, half an hour.”

“Oh, no, that’s, he’s a Liverpool fan.” 

“Ah,” she said delicately. “Football.”

He sat in the chair next to her and even in the simple action it seemed like his limbs went everywhere. “So, yeah, hi I’m Fitz,”

“Jemma Simmons,” she held out her hand and he shook it too enthusiastically. His hands were cracked dry and calloused, there was a thick bandage over his one thumb. 

“Do you have your paper on you? We could swap now and set a time to talk about it later.”

“Yes, right.” She dug through her binder for a moment before coming out with the copy she’d printed to hand off to the prof before he revealed they were doing this swap thing. They were supposed to grade each other’s papers, a learning experience for the TA work lots of grad students did in their later years. “What’s your week look like, I could meet day after tomorrow?”

“Uh, that’s Tuesday,” he stared at the ceiling while he though. “I’m in the lab until two but I could meet after that, we could get lunch?”

“Sure.”

“I’m in Engineering, building five, it’s right across from the student center, we could meet there?” 

“Sounds good.”

He clicked out his pen and rolled up the sleeve of his jumper, nodding, writing on his forearm that was already covered in other scribbles of ink, then he dug his paper out of the backpack on his shoulder. “See you then.”

She nodded, took his paper and handed off her own and kept packing up her things. She had another class to get to, this one an upper level on biological engineering that she was auditing because she thought it might take her research in an interesting direction later. 

She told herself that she was only going to glance at his paper that night, then get a good night’s sleep for once and do her work in the morning, but she was only two paragraphs in and she knew she wouldn’t be sleeping until she figured this boy out. 

There had been essentially no limit on what they could write about, and he’d chosen some cutting edge research on rocket engines, and she was enthralled. She knew nothing about it, she kept having to look up words that weren’t in her dictionary, but it was fascinating, and he was a good writer. He rarely spoke up in class but when he did he stuttered and talked in rambling circles, but his writing was clear, easy to understand if you had a degree in mechanical engineering, which she assumed he did. 

She blinked and it was two in the morning, her eyes were burning from squinting in the dim light of her desk lamp and she had sticky notes strewn around with comments and questions littering them. She stacked the papers while taking a swig of her ice cold tea. It would be a struggle the next day not to spend all her reading time in the engineering section of the library, just to figure out some of what he was talking about. She almost cursed herself for setting their meeting in two days. She didn’t want to wait to talk to him again.

December 2004

She walked home from the clinic through the snow. The wind was so strong it felt like it was pushing her backwards as she walked into it, that every step took her backwards instead of forwards. It felt right though, to struggle. She hunched her shoulders, trying to keep the cold from seeping in through her coat collar, and trudged on. 

She had no idea what to do. She knew, rationally, that she should call Fitz, that she should go to the pharmacy and pick up prenatal vitamins, that she should go to class and do her homework, that she should call her mom. But she had no idea what to do. 

She couldn’t have a baby, she was seventeen. She was a year and a bit into her second PhD. Her parents would be so disappointed. 

Bile rose up in her throat, the low level of nausea that had been ongoing for weeks spiked up and she doubled over on the sidewalk. Her stomach seized and she coughed, spitting up stomach bile, losing the weak tea and muffin she only barely managed to get down before going to the clinic. It was dark and green and gross against the white snow of the sidewalk bank. 

She couldn’t breathe, she was sure she was dying, there on the sidewalk, in the snow, where no one would find her for weeks, months if the plows buried her body. It cycled, her stomach twisted and her throat burned and she couldn’t breathe. It was the middle of the day and the streets were empty. Blood rushed through her ears, sounding like a semi-truck on a gravel road. 

Then it was over. She spit twice more into the snow, trying to rid the taste from her mouth, and scrubbed the tears out of her eyes with her mitten covered hand. She wanted to cry, she wanted to sink down into the snowbank and let it all bury her with the snow. But she kept trudging. She used the snow to clean the worst of the splatter off her boots, and she walked home. 

She slammed open the front door of the apartment and knocked the snow off her boots before she realized that there was someone home. Kendra, her roommate for the past year, was sitting curled up on the couch with a thick textbook. She was in med school and it seemed all she did was read. 

“I thought you had a lab?”

Jemma shook her head. “I wasn’t feeling well.”

Kendra nodded. “There’s a bad flu going around. I heard you puking a couple nights ago too.”

Jemma grimaced, “Sorry.” She thought she’d kept her sickness subtle, but evidently not. 

“Happens,” Kendra shrugged. “You need anything?” 

They got along well because Kendra was nice, but not maternal or overbearing in the way that a twenty something year old could be to a teenager. She didn’t treat Jemma much different than if she’d been her own age. It helped that they were both only children, so neither fell easily into a sister role. 

“I’m just going to go back to bed.”

“Sleep it off, good plan.” Kendra went back to her book. Jemma’s stomach churned again, she couldn’t sleep off a pregnancy. 

Jemma laid down in her bed and pulled the blankets over her face. She tried to make a pro and con list in her head, behind her eyes. She drew it in the darkness she found there, with white ink, glowing like a computer screen, in the font of her own handwriting, she listed out reasons to get an abortion and reasons to keep the baby. It wasn’t even a baby, it wasn’t even a fetus, just an embryo. Five weeks. Twelve point five percent. 

Twelve point five percent of a kid was sitting in her uterus. 

She always thought she was mature for her age. Every had always told her so. 

The lists didn’t work so she scrapped them. She tried to imagine it instead, herself with a baby, going home and abandoning her PhD, raising a kid in her parents’ house, her mom hovering over her shoulder, or staying in school, running the baby to daycare while she sat in the lab for seventeen hours, getting an apartment with Fitz and trying to make it all work at once. Then she thought about abortions, how simple they’d become, she was pretty sure there were pills these days, had heard someone talking about it once as nothing more than a bad period. The thought of it made her want to retch again. 

Then there was adoption. She had no idea how that would work, if she could adopt out a baby in the US without citizenship or in the UK without residency. Both she and Fitz were on F-1 visas, so they had to stay in full time school to remain eligible. 

She should call Fitz. She should call her mother. But she had research to do, she had an appointment with a pregnancy counsellor, a thing she hadn’t even know existed. She wanted facts to present to Fitz, and an opinion formed before it could be swayed by her mother. 

Blood rushed hard in her ears, her heart rate had spiked just thinking about it all. She stuck her head out of the covers, the air had become thick and hot beneath them, lacking oxygen in the way that made her breathe harder, more desperate, breaths. The cool room was a shock to her system. She focused on keeping her breaths even, counting each one in and out to stay steady, and somehow, she fell asleep. 

She slept until it was dark out, the early winter sunset glowing in the distance behind the clouds, then ate a packet of ramen without the flavour because it felt like anything at all would trip her stomach up and set it off. Then she did her work, the reading she had to do for class and the stuff she kept up to date on for her dissertation. It was easy to pretend for a minute that everything was normal. She fell back asleep surrounded by her work, a crick in her neck, and the rest of her noodles sitting cold on her bedside table. 

Wednesdays she had classes all day. She took a lot of classes for a PhD student since she hadn’t had a ton of education in chemistry and she wanted to work it into her field of study. She was essentially doing a second masters at the same time, and the real reason she’d gone to MIT was because May, her advisor, let her do it.

Her focus had been biology since she was eight years old, sure she’d dabbled in other hobby interests and taken a lot of prerequisite courses, but everything she learned was viewed through that lens. For a long time, she thought she was going to become an MD, but then she realized she loved research. Chemistry had snuck in on the sidelines, and only when she was finishing up at Manchester did she realize that she could spend a whole decade on it if she wanted, that it would only enrich everything she had already learned. 

So two years into her current program she still took basically a full course load, learning to try to decide what specifically her dissertation should focus on. Unlike Fitz who was only in one class this semester but was mostly trying to get his research in order and preparing for his comps. 

Fitz, who she still had to talk to. There’d been a message on the board that morning saying he’d called while she was asleep, but she didn’t call him back, couldn’t call him back. 

Jemma walked to class with ginger tea in her thermos and hoped not to throw up on the road that day. It was nicer out, the sky clear and the sun shining, and she felt lighter than she had on her walk home the day before. She made a promise to herself that she’d talk to Fitz on Thursday, after her counselling appointment. She would make sure that they sat down and talked. 

But the day rolled around and despite the messages he’d left she still hadn’t talked to him. It wasn’t any easier to call. So she’d sent him an email. _Fitz,_ she’d written early that morning when she’d woken up sick again, _I have something I need to discuss with you. Can you come over this afternoon?_ She hadn’t signed it, but less than an hour later she’d gotten a response. _Yup. Hope you’re feeling better._

She knew Kendra had relayed to him that she was sick when he called for the fifth time and she was tired of picking up the phone, but she was pretty sure he knew her well enough to know that something else was going on too. So she sat on the couch in the living room, by herself, feeling the silence of the empty apartment, wishing she’d given him a specific time to show up so that she could do anything but sit and worry. 

At least Kendra had said she was spending the night at her boyfriend’s so no one would walk in on their conversation. Jemma nursed a mug of ginger tea and worried her lip between her teeth. She had no idea how Fitz was going to react. That had never happened before, and she didn’t like the feeling of it. The silence was overwhelming, but she’d tried turning on the TV, she’d tried studying, and everything else made it worse. 

Then there was a knock at the door, and a second later it opened. Fitz popped his head in. “Hey,” he said, shutting the door behind him and shucking his coat. “How are you feeling?”

She bit her lip, hard, and had to stop herself from drawing blood. “I’ve been better, but I’m okay.” She didn’t move, she couldn’t move, but it was okay because he sat down on the couch next to her, his body still radiating the warmth it had created out in the cold, his thigh just barely touching hers. 

“You know you’re kind of freaking me out.”

“Yeah, sorry.” She sighed, the words bubbled in her chest, like heart burn, like sick, but she couldn’t throw up even if she tried. She just had to tell him. 

“So you said we needed to talk, what’s going on?”

She took a deep breath, it felt like the room was a million degrees, it felt like the room was in Kelvin. Her voice was small when she managed to get it out and she hated that, but she physically couldn’t change it. “You remember thanksgiving?”

Fitz blushed beet red. “Uh, yeah, I remember.” He couldn’t look her in the eye. She was sure that without the consequences, they would have never talked about the fat that they’d had sex. She knew Fitz liked her, that he’d always had a crush on her, and she’d always thought that maybe one day, once they were done school, once they had time for other things in their lives, he might ask her out, but she also knew the sex had nothing to do with that. That it was a hormone, wine, and curiosity fueled aberration.

“Well, I’m pregnant.”

There was perfect silence in the room for only one heartbeat, then Fitz spluttered. “What?” He sounded particularly Scottish, which he always did when his emotions ran high. “How?”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m sure you took health class in school, Fitz, you know how reproduction works.” They’d used a condom, she wasn’t stupid, but she hadn’t checked the expiration date, hadn’t looked it over for defaults. 

He cringed at an obvious memory. “Sorry, I didn’t mean how, I just… meant…” he didn’t continue. 

She tried to wait him out but it felt like he was thinking for an eternity. “I haven’t decided anything yet but I thought you should know.”

“Okay, yeah, thank you?”

She almost felt like she could laugh at him but it got stuck in her chest. She stared at him for a long time, or at least it felt like a long time. They sat on the couch and his brow stayed furrowed, his lips pursed like when he was staring at a blueprint, at a piece of tech that he thought should work but didn’t. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking, and she could always tell what he was thinking, but there was a sudden impenetrable wall between them. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” she finally asked when she couldn’t stand the silence anymore. 

“Uh,” He rubbed his hand over his brow, pressed his fingers into his eyes. She wanted to snatch his hand away from his face and tell him to stop hurting himself but she didn’t dare touch him. His knee wasn’t listing into her thigh anymore, he was rigid. “I think I need another minute before I can talk.”

She nodded, what else could she do? and went back to counting her breaths, in and out, steady, calming, under her control. It hardly felt like a minute before he spoke again, she wondered if he counted to sixty seconds, he could be literal like that. 

“What are you thinking?”

Jemma blew out a breath. “Keeping it, putting it up for adoption.”

She felt his stomach drop in the look on his face. 

“Can you do that? Can we do that?”

“If the baby was born here it would be an American citizen regardless of our status so we could arrange a private adoption.”

“And back home?” 

He wasn’t breathing, she was sure of it. “There’s no private adoption in the UK, child services would decide.”

“No.” His face blanched. “No, I am not putting our baby into care.”

“It’s what would make the most sense. I could still take all the classes I’d planned for this year then take the summer off and go home for my last trimester.” She was talking but she knew he wasn’t listening, his gaze was far off, like he was working out a problem in his head and she knew that she was just background noise. She kept talking. “I would be 24 weeks at the beginning of May so there’s a chance no one would even find out and I could be back for September term like nothing happened.”

He blinked and focused on her, coming back to reality. “Like nothing…” He stood up. “I… I need to think about… this. Can we talk later?” He was already walking towards the door, fishing his coat out of the pile. 

Jemma stayed on the couch, her feet planted on the floor, her hands on her knees. “Sure,” she said, just as the front door slammed shut. 

November 2003

Jemma sat on the floor of Fitz dorm room surrounded by her project notes and packets of crisps Fitz kept running to the machine at the end of the hall to supply. They’d left the library after being shot one too many dirty looks when their hushed voices became more than whispers. It was hard to be quiet with Fitz. 

They’d only known each other for two months, but after their first conversation about their papers, when she’d discovered that talking to Fitz one on one was even better than reading his thoughts on the page, they’d been fast friends. They talked so much she was sure she knew everything about him. 

They’d had fairly similar educations so far, skipped through primary and secondary school as fast as they could then had gone straight into uni as young teenagers. Fitz was only on his first PhD though, but he’d moved to Cambridge when he was thirteen to do a combined master’s so he’d lived away from home for a lot longer than she had. He was in Engineering, though which subset specifically was unclear given how much he hopped around through the different departments. 

He dumped a handful of Doritos in his mouth and talked around them, “I can’t figure out how to maintain the power level though.” He crunched the bag up into a ball and tossed it towards the bin. “The snacks just aren’t the same.” 

Jemma shook her head. “I miss biscuits.” ‘Cookies’ were just not the same. Sometimes it seemed like half their conversations were lamenting the things they couldn’t get in America. “Have you tried a solar generator?”

“Yeah but it’s too unstable.” He threw himself backwards onto the floor, his head hitting a pillow that had fallen off his bed precisely in the center. “I would kill for some Hobnobs. I swear when I come back from Christmas my whole bag is going to be full of food.”

“Who needs clothes when there are Jaffa Cakes?” 

“That’s what I’m talking about Simmons!”

“What are your plans for Christmas anyway? Can you even get out of the lab?” Fitz was a research monkey, his current degree more a continuation of his last than anything else so he was jumping between different projects going on at the university to learn from them and get experience before starting his own. 

“I’ve got a week off, my advisor insisted. Said he didn’t want me burning myself out in the first year, so I’m basically being sent home. What about you? Your classes must be almost done.”

“Yeah, I’ve got a couple exams to take in the first week of December but then I’m headed home. I’ll be back before the new year though; the flights were way cheaper that way.”

Fitz nodded knowingly. “I’m coming home on the first which is going to be a bloody nightmare. My mum always throws a New Year’s thing for the whole neighbourhood and it’s impossible not to get thoroughly smashed. It’s going to be twelve long hours of suffering to start off 2004.”

She grimaced with him. “Are you flying through Heathrow? Or Amsterdam?”

“Heathrow, I think. Next year we should coordinate so that we’re on the same flight.”

Jemma nodded, “That would certainly make it less arduous.” She usually read on planes to pass the time and hoped she didn’t have a chatty neighbour but having Fitz there might actually make a long day of travel fun. 

“You know that’s why people think you’re intimidating.” 

Jemma frowned. “People don’t think I’m intimidating. I’m tiny.” She seemed to have stopped growing sometime in the last year and it was a bit of a sore spot. Her mum was still taller than her, only by a little but still. Her dad was head and shoulders above her and she’d hoped she’d be inheriting those genes but evidently not. 

“They do, because you use words like ‘arduous’ instead of shitty.”

She rolled her eyes. “Just because I don’t swear freely and frequently like you do doesn’t mean people are scared of me.”

“Not scared of, just intimidated by. I was, when we first met. You’re the same age as me and you already have your doctorate.”

She put her book aside and studied the fibers of the thick carpet below her. They were dark green, the rug evidently a purchase Fitz had made himself, not something that came with the dorm room, which surprised her. She’d expected him to live in a sty but the chaos was organized. 

Her peers had always looked at her funny, she would have thought she’d be used to it by now, but she wasn’t. Every new classroom she entered she thought for some silly reason it would be the one where no one looked twice at her age and only saw her ideas. She wasn’t the only teenager at MIT by a long shot, but it occurred to her suddenly that she might be the most educated one. 

Fitz nudged her shoulder with his knee. “It’s a good thing, Simmons. They’re impressed by you, because you’re impressive.”

She met his gaze, found worry filling up his eyes to the brim and something else, something fearful and cowering, so she tried to smile at him. It wasn’t his fault. 

She tapped her book with the back end of her pen. “Come on, there’s still lots to do.” 

December 2004

She didn’t hear from Fitz for four days. A pit grew in her stomach that she couldn’t breathe away, that she couldn’t do anything about, the longer it went since she talked to him, since she’d told him. She went to her classes, she studied for her exams, but her days were covered with a film of anxiety. She couldn’t track the passing of time, would look up to the clock in a lecture she thought was almost over to find only five minutes had passed and would tell herself she’d only read for twenty minutes before bed then end up finishing the book. 

She did her own research to add to what the counsellor had given her on adoption in the US, on the time MIT would allow her to take off. She read stories from birth mothers who regretted the loss of their child and ones who claimed it was the best decision they ever made. She couldn’t come up with a pragmatic reason not to get an abortion. There was only the feeling in her chest. 

Late in the evening on the fourth day of silence, after she’d struggled once again to get down some plain broth and was sitting in her bed with her notes for her inorganic chemistry exam the next day, Fitz burst into her room. He looked like he hadn’t slept in four days. His eyes were wild and his hair a mess and there was something that might have been dirt, or engine grease, creating a shadow under his jaw. 

“Can we talk?” he panted, like he’d run through the snow to get to her apartment, which he might have. He didn’t have a coat on and there was snow dripping off his hair onto his jumper. 

“Yeah,” she sat up straighter, put her book aside. “Shut the door.” She still hadn’t told Kendra, despite her suspicion that the other girl knew something was up, Jemma’s ‘flu’ was sticking around and she didn’t have any other symptoms of a virus. 

Fitz closed the door and sat on her desk chair. He pushed his mop of hair out of his face. “I’m ready to listen.”

She nodded, pulled the folder out from under her bedside table, and laid out the information she’d gathered on adoption, first in the US, then the UK. He sat and listened, really listened, she could tell because he stared at his hands while she talked, worked his thumb nail through the creases in his palm. He didn’t ask for clarification or anything more, he waited, he listened. Then she was done and he was quiet. 

Finally, after she’d almost worked herself up into a full blown panic attack, he spoke, so quiet she almost missed it. 

“I don’t know if I can do this.” 

She sighed and everything came out in a rush, all the emotion she’d been carrying and trying to keep tamped down by logic and facts. “Well, we’ve got to do something, Fitz,” she snapped. 

“I know, I know-“ he put his head in his hands for half a second then sat up straight again. “It’s just, what are you going to do about school? You shouldn’t have to put your career on hold. I was talking with my mum and she said that pregnancy really isn’t easy, and you’re already so overworked.” 

A drop of anger slid through her, like grease in a hot pan; he thought she couldn’t do it. He thought she’d fail, and it kicked her competitive drive into gear. “Obviously there are some details to work out, and I’d have to talk to May, but I hardly think it’s impossible.”

He scoffed, defensive because she was snapping at him. “Not impossible but pretty nearly.”

She got to her feet and started piling her notes back up on her desk. She dismissed him, because that wasn’t the point. She wanted to know what he was really thinking, really feeling, not just the logic that he’d applied. They weren’t supposed to be yelling at each other but they always did. “Lots of people have babies in grad school!”

“Yeah, but those people aren’t sixteen-year-old geniuses!”

“Seventeen,” she said bitterly. 

“Fine! Seventeen-year-old geniuses.”

She hated her age, always had. It was inconsequential. She was on her way to her second PhD. She’d finished her A Levels when she was twelve and had lived on her own in a foreign country for over a year. She had the intelligence to make this decision, she had the maturity. She wasn’t just any seventeen-year-old. 

“I can do what I want. It’s my decision Fitz, I was just telling you as a courtesy.” Even before the words left her she knew they weren’t true, she’d wanted to tell him to have a discussion, she wanted to tell him because his opinion was the one that mattered most to her, she wanted to tell him because he was the father. But he couldn’t hear any of that, it was locked inside her head, and no matter what anyone said, they couldn’t actually read each other’s thoughts. 

She saw the wound on his face and he took an actual step back. She wasn’t sure when he’d stood up. 

He stuck his chin out, brought himself taller. “Well fine then.”

“Fine.” She turned on her heel and wrenched her bedroom door open, motioning him out. “I’ll see you after Christmas.”

“I guess so.” He walked out of her room and out through the apartment and she was suddenly glad her parents hadn’t allowed them to live together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it couldn't all be fun and games. Let me know what you thought? I'm also @sinkingsidewalks on tumblr if you like


	3. finish my own sentences (the way you used to)

November 2004

Thanksgiving had cleared out the entire campus, even their fellow graduate students who seemed to leave the labs for nothing and no one. It was the second year it had happened but Jemma still wasn’t used to it. The campus wasn’t even this quiet on Christmas day. 

She and Fitz were sitting in her apartment alone, some kind of holiday movie playing on the TV that they weren’t watching. Kendra had gone back to Connecticut for the weekend and left Jemma a bottle of wine and a wink, telling her to have fun over the holidays. So they drank it, American drinking laws were really ridiculous, and got a bit fuzzy since they were out of practice. 

“It’s really a ridiculous holiday,” Fitz said, his limbs hanging off the couch, more off it than on. “Like, let’s feel good about ourselves we killed all the Indians!”

Jemma muffled her laughter and rolled her eyes. “You’re not supposed to say ‘Indians’ it’s outdated.”

“I was being period accurate. Columbus was a dumbass who thought this was India, from my understanding of it at least.”

There was an interesting difference between British history and the American history of the British. It was a good thing neither of them was in humanities. “Those are our ancestors too, you know.”

“That did the raping and pillaging, I’m aware.” 

“And genocide, don’t forget that.”

“Happy thanksgiving!” Fitz held up his wine, which was in a hard plastic cup because she hardly trusted him with dishes sober, to cheers. 

“Happy thanksgiving, Fitz.” She hit her cup into his and the plastic made a dull thud. She felt warm all the way through, even though it was already turning to winter outside the windows, from the wine, but also from Fitz. Sometimes she couldn’t understand how she’d only known him for a year, it seemed impossible that he hadn’t been with her her whole life. She caught herself sometimes, when they were talking, referring to things that happened five or ten or fifteen years ago like he was there, like he’d experienced them by her side, forgetting that she had to explain the story because he was a new audience. Fourteen months ago she’d hated him, but now she couldn’t imagine her life without him. 

She looked over and he was staring at her, as he often was. His eyes were glassy, but vibrant blue even in the dimmed lights. He watched her like he saw all of her, like he could identify every atom of her body and understand it, like each of her thoughts was a well-worn path he could travel when even her father often found her a forest he’d only get lost in. 

Jemma leaned over and she kissed him. His mouth was warm, warmer than her and she felt like a forest fire, and soft and it fell open beneath her lips. He tasted like wine and peanut butter that he’d eaten straight from the jar with a butter knife. She’d kissed boys before, a handful of them, and it had always been precarious, like walking a tightrope in ice skates, she had to think about every detail, where to put her hands, how to tilt her face, but with Fitz it was breathing, so easy she didn’t think about it as she slid into his lap. 

“Jemma,” he said somewhere between a plea and a groan. She almost missed it, her mind was spinning so fast she couldn’t keep up, but in the good way, the way where it felt like she was juggling and she knew none of the balls would drop, not that she was waiting for one to. 

“Yeah?” She said it against his lips and didn’t wait for a response. The room was too hot, his hands on her waist burning, radiating heat like an open flame, so she shucked her sweater, leaving her in a t-shirt. 

“We’re drunk,” he mumbled, not pulling away. She paused, thought about it, felt her own body. She could feel the alcohol bubbling through her veins but it was tamped down by the desire, she felt in control of herself, fully, in a way she rarely did. It wasn’t at all like the time her cousin got her properly drunk and she’d felt like everything was spinning. 

She pulled back and looked at him, his pupils were wide and dark, a sure sign of attraction, and his breathing was coming in puffs, but his eyes were bright and alert, he looked like himself. “I’m not. Are you?”

He paused and she could see him take stock of himself. “I guess not so much.”

“Do you want to stop? Because I don’t.” She knew he liked her, it was obvious in the way he looked at her, and she thought for a flicker of a moment that it might be manipulative of her when she didn’t exactly know what her feelings were for him. But she didn’t want the logic which usually ruled her life to get in the way of a feeling. She knew she loved him too, she just wasn’t sure what way. 

He looked at her a second longer and she could see him processing, could see the benefits and the risks being weighed out in his mind, then he reached up one hand and cupped her cheek, stroked his thumb over the thin skin beneath her eye, and pulled her back in for another kiss. 

September 2003

Jemma was up to her eyeballs in reading and it was only the first week of classes. She was enrolled in five courses, three with labs, all while also trying to keep up to date on the research currently being published. It was one in the morning and she had on her docket a book her advisor recommended, four articles on various points of microbiology, and two chapters from a kinetics textbook for her class at ten the next morning. 

Her eyes burned and her stomach rumbled but she didn’t have time to figure out when the last time she’d eaten was. She had to finish reading. She had to write a lab report on catalytic processes. She felt dizzy from the caffeine and hunger and sick from the lack of sleep. But it didn’t matter because she’d be fine. She’d be fine and she’d get everything done and it would be worth it. 

She read until it didn’t make sense, until the letters stopped forming words and the words sentences and the sentences ideas. Then she slept for maybe two hours, the sun rising through all of it, until her alarm jerked her awake. There was a deep pillow crease on her cheek and a crick in her spine from where she’d fallen asleep on her textbook. 

The apartment was overly silent as she made herself a mug of tea. Kendra had introduced her to the American concept of Eggos in their first week as roommates so she put two waffles in the toaster and waited for them to crisp up. The building they lived in was mostly students, pretty much equidistant between MIT and Harvard. So far, there hadn’t been any of the partying that could be expected in college housing, whether that was because the walls were thick or because everyone was just as busy studying as she was, Jemma didn’t know. 

She ate breakfast over her notes, she hadn’t left the waffles in long enough so they were slightly soggy in the middle but generally appetizing enough to her desperate stomach, and trekked off to class. So far the weather had been perfectly nice, but she’d been warned about the snowstorms of the winter and the blistering humidity of the summer. As she walked she tried to recite the notes she’d read over breakfast and found it a struggle. Her teeth sunk into her bottom lip, worrying, as she thought. She had to remind herself constantly to watch for traffic. 

She always chose a middle row in lectures, because she didn’t like to sit by the door and be distracted by the latecomers. Kinetics was in an amphitheater that was mostly empty, so she usually sat a couple rows up. There were a few groups of girls that all seemed to know each other and chatted around her before the prof showed up. She’d chime in occasionally but they must have all been in the same program because they talked about tests she wasn’t taking and professors she didn’t know. They were nice to her, but in that way that older girls were always nice to her, like she reminded them of their little sisters who they had an undertone of distaste for. They didn’t talk in class though, took notes diligently like she did, so she didn’t mind sitting next to them. 

After kinetics she had a lab in the same building so she found a bench in the hall to wait and get back to her reading. She’d only made it halfway through the book from her advisor the night before and she had a meeting with May the next week that she wanted to have it finished by. She got lost in it until a rush of students emerged in the hallway, signalling the start time of her lab. 

Once she was done with her classes she headed to the library for more research, to find what the next thing she would read was. On her way she stopped at a coffee cart and got a drink, large and black, to wake her back up. She’d gone a little backwards in her education so while her classes were interesting, they weren’t always challenging, but that was nothing new for her. She drank the coffee as she walked, still scalding hot, burning her tongue and all the way down her throat, then discarded it, finished, once she reached the library. 

She settled down at a desk in her usual section and got to the classwork of the day. It was easier for her to get the little things done and out of the way first so that they didn’t clutter up her mind while she was trying to focus on the larger tasks. The afternoon slipped by as she got to her research and before she even noticed the sun was waning again so she packed up her books. 

On the walk home she made herself a to do list, for the night and for the week and for the month. She had them written down in her diary too but she went over them in her mind almost daily just to make sure she wasn’t forgetting anything. 

It was easy to tell when Kendra was home because music could be heard from the moment she opened the door. Jemma walked into the apartment, into the small living space and let her backpack fall off her shoulders, leaving an ache behind.

“Hey,” Kendra said, moving around the kitchen, she was cooking something complicated with a confidence Jemma didn’t relate to. 

“How was your day?” Jemma asked, and she realized it was the first one on one conversation she’d had all day. She’d answered questions in class, she’d ordered from the barista, but she hadn’t actually engaged with anyone. It wasn’t odd for that to happen, but sometimes it shocked her. She was so used to being lonely, it didn’t really bother her anymore. 

Kendra shrugged. “All studying. You?”

Jemma nodded. “The same.”

“This’ll be done in like a half an hour if you want some, it’s my mom’s chili recipe.”

Her stomach was rumbling at the smell of spices, her mouth-watering at the scent of cooking meat. “Sure, that sounds good.”

“I’ll let you know when it’s done.”

“Thanks.” Jemma stacked up her books from the kitchen table and took them into her room. She spread everything out on her bed and made a metal list of order of importance, then she sat down and started reading again. 

December 2004

Jemma had met Melinda May when she was fourteen at a conference in London she’d gone to with her advisor at the University of Manchester. They’d had a forty-minute conversation about microbiology at a mixer Jemma was far too young to be at under any other circumstances and at the end of it May had handed her a card with her email address and said _If you ever want to get into chemistry, let me know._

At the time Jemma had thought it was a lark. She’d acquired dozens of cards over the course of that conference and many others. She’d been neck deep in bio and she’d never thought she’d want to go another direction. But when she’d been finalizing her first dissertation, getting ready to defend it, and wondering what on earth she was going to do next, that conversation with May popped into her head and wouldn’t leave her. So she went into her carefully filed folder of business cards and found the one for _Melinda May, Head of Chemical Sciences at MIT._

It had been two years, Jemma didn’t know if May was still working there or if she would even remember her, but she’d sent an email off anyway, saying she was looking for her next thing, and did May know anyone working in chemistry in the UK that she could get in touch with on Jemma’s behalf. Two days later she’d received a response organizing a meeting and tour of MIT for Jemma and her family.

May was quiet and studious, the opposite of Jemma’s bright eyed enthusiasm, but they spoke the same language in science and had always gotten along well. Jemma was proud to consider May not just her PhD advisor, but also her mentor. Which meant she was sweating bullets standing outside May’s office door, ten minutes before the meeting she’d arranged. 

She had to tell her, she knew that, it was the first step towards keeping the pregnancy, but she was utterly terrified to do it. She was more scared to tell May than she was her mother, because at least with her mum there was a continent separating them for most of the year. It was a logistical nightmare, she knew, especially considering her visa required her to stay in full time school, and she knew it would put a bad spin on the university once it got out, but mostly, she didn’t want to disappoint May, and she felt like she had. She’d put it off long enough though, her flight to London left in two days. 

It had been a week since she talked with Fitz, since they’d had it out at each other, and she hadn’t heard anything from him since, nor did she expect to. He’d made his position perfectly clear, and it certainly wasn’t going to change her mind. If that’s how it was, that’s how it was, she’d find a way to cope. 

The door swung open from the inside and Jemma jumped. May looked at her, an eyebrow quirked telling her she knew she’d been hovering. 

“Come in.”

“Thanks,” Jemma said, taking the seat on one side of the desk, across from May. May’s office was precisely organized, a clear space in front of her computer for whatever she was working on, stacks of papers on the file cabinet behind her desk, and textbooks slotted into a bookshelf in the corner. She had a row of tiny cacti on the window sill and one of those ‘today I’m feeling…’ flip books on the front of the desk that was perpetually set to ‘apathetic’ which Jemma was sure she hadn’t bought for herself. 

May didn’t say anything as Jemma fidgeted in her chair, she waited for Jemma to talk, like she always did, but today it was unnerving, because Jemma wasn’t there to ask about a class she should take or a lab she wanted to be a part of. 

She’d planned out a whole speech, had written it down the night before and memorized it. It was carefully thought out and well organized and made her seem mature and responsible but sitting in May’s office it slipped right out of her mind and she ended up blurting out, “I’m pregnant.”

May’s eyebrows shot up, which for her was equivalent to someone else reacting in screams or tears. 

“I think I’m keeping it.”

“You think?” May asked and Jemma was all of a sudden sure. With May she didn’t feel like she sounded crazy the way she had with Fitz. With May everything was calm and collected and manageable. 

She straightened her spine. “I am. I’m giving it up for adoption.”

May nodded. Jemma knew she wouldn’t try to change her mind. She knew she wouldn’t sugar coat anything, but that she would also treat Jemma like the adult she was. 

“You’ll need to take some time off.” 

“Just the summer, at most I think. It depends if I’m going home or not. If I stay I should be able to keep on track, or almost.” 

May nodded, grabbed a pen and pad of sticky notes. “I’ll give you the name of my obstetrician. The clinic could refer you but you’ll get in faster this way. How far along are you?”

“Six weeks. I’m due in August.” She breathed for what felt like the first time all morning. May was on her side. May would defend her from anything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bit of a short one I know but 4 is shaping up to be big! Hope everyone's having a good sunday (or whatever day you're reading this on) let me know what you think!


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